John Conyers Quotes

I declare that I will establish peace in this world.

Among the many defects that have been pointed out in the Federal Constitution ... is an office for promoting and preserving perpetual peace in our country.... Let a Secretary of Peace be established.

We must achieve peace because it's the only way to build this nation

Without a near-peer competitor (or several) to deter or a major war on the horizon, Washington found a new foreign policy calling: renovating weak or failed states.

It's impossible to impose peace, only to create it.

Yet, here we are, long and difficult years into that conflict," ... "we still have not created the state we promised them. On the contrary, our costly and valiant efforts have produced an outcome our government did not predict or intend-a failed state spinning out of control into anarchy and civil war.

Together, we can make a U.S. Department of Peace into a reality, and leave a gift of peace for generations to come.

No one is talking about occupying Iraq for five to ten years.

I can't see democracy occurring by force - after an Iraqi war, because of the fallout from that.

Let him who looks for a monument to Washington look around the United States. Your freedom, your independence, your national power, your prosperity, and your prodigious growth are a monument to him.

We must abandon the failed policy of nation-building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, in Libya, in Egypt and in Syria. Instead, we must work with all of our allies who share our goal of destroying ISIS and stamping out Islamic terrorism and doing it now, doing it quickly.

I wish I could attribute the absence of any conventional Arab offensive in the last 20 years to a change of political climate or a willingness to abide by past accords. But unfortunately it is more likely that the Egyptians or Syrians concluded that the next time their tanks headed to Tel Aviv, there was nothing stopping the counterassaults from ending up in downtown Cairo or Damascus.

Civilization just takes it as a given that the whole world was flooding. Then science came and you had geology and modern astrophysics, and time became well understood going back billions of years. So enlightened religious people, as a necessity, had to shed the magical elements of the Bible. A little known fact is that Thomas Jefferson did just that. There's something called the Jefferson Bible. It's not widely publicized because it sort of conflicts with certain people's ideas of what the founding fathers were.

A European says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with me? An American says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with him? I make no suggestion that one side or other is right, but observation over many years leads me to believe it is true.

It's true Fang and I fight, but we've never gone to bed mad. Of course, one year we were up for three months.

With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.

No time limit in Iraq; stay until we achieve stability.

I chose to start my world tour in Israel for a very specific and important reason. As you know, the Middle East and all the conflicts that occur here and that have been occurring for thousands of years... They have to stop... You can't be a fan of mine and not want peace in the world.

After forty years of marriage we still stood with broken swords in our hands.

Every day in the news we're hearing how rampant violence is in our communities, both here in America and around the world. I believe that the establishement of a United States Department of Peace can greatly help alleviate the many problems that we hear about on a daily basis. Our children deserve so much better. It is our job right here and now to build a better world. By establishing a US Department of Peace we are doing just that. Please get involved ... It's up to us to be the change that we wish for and the time is now to co-create it.

For the eight years I was president I never let my dream of a nuclear-free world fade from my mind.

In the initiative that we issued at the beginning of year 2013 we said every party with no exceptions as long as they give up their armaments.

The [Vietnam] war's gone on for three years. And we'd thought we'd ended it because we'd done exactly what we were told and what we told ourselves we'd had to do. We had a majority. We were against the war and this created a crisis for democracy and a crisis for the antiwar movement.

We've had the U.N. for almost 60 years, yet we've never actually made a fundamental list of all the big things that we can do in the world, and said, 'Which of them should we do first?'

Politics is a dynamic process. When I was a young man in the 1970s, Yasser Arafat had just perpetrated various terrorist attacks. Just a few years later, after I had entered European Parliament, the same Yasser Arafat was given the Nobel Peace Prize.